Collected Stories

the office. I had to work around Wilder, who’s been reading John le Carre. Sitting in the middle of his female household like a Sioux Indian in his wickiup. Like Sitting Bull. All the same, he’s often very sweet. Even when he acts like the reigning male. And he’d be totally at sea if I weren’t… oops!”

“If you weren’t manning the ship,” said Ithiel.

Well, it was a feminine household, and for that reason perhaps Gina felt less foreign in New York. She said that she loved the city, it had so many accommodations for women specifically. Everybody who arrived, moreover, already knew the place because of movies and magazines, and when John Kennedy said he was a Berliner, all of Berlin could have answered, “So? We are New Yorkers.” There was no such thing as being strange here, in Gina’s opinion.

“That’s what you think, baby” was Clara’s response, although it was not made to Gina Wegman, it was made to Ms. Wong. “And let’s hope she never finds out what this town can do to a young person. But when you think about such a pretty child and the Italian charm of her looks, so innocent—although innocence is a tricky thing to prove. You can’t expect her to forget about being a girl just because the surroundings are so dangerous.”

“Do you let her ride the subway?”

“Let her!” said Clara. “When the young things go into the street, where’s your control over them? All I can do is pray she’ll be safe. I told her if she was going to wear a short skirt she should also put on a coat. But what good is advice without a slum background? What a woman needs today is some slum experience. However, it’s up to me to keep an eye on the child, and I must assume she’s innocent and doesn’t want to be rubbed up against in the rush hours by dirty-sex delinquents.”

“It’s hard to be in the responsible-adult position,” said Laura.

“It’s the old-time religion in me. Stewardship.” Clara said this partly in fun. Yet when she invoked her background, her formative years, she became for a moment the girl with the wide forehead, the large eyes, the smallish nose, who had been forced by her parents to memorize long passages from Galatians and Corinthians.

“She suits the children,” said Ms. Wong.

“They’re very comfortable with her, and there’s no strain with Lucy.” For Clara, Lucy was the main thing. At this stage she was so sullen—overweight, shy of making friends, jealous, resistant, troubled. Hard to move. Clara had often suggested that Lucy’s hair be cut, the heavy curls that bounded her face. “The child has hair like Jupiter,” said Clara in one of her sessions with Laura. “Sometimes I think she must be as strong—potentially—as a hod carrier.”

“Wouldn’t she like it short and trim, like yours?”

“I don’t want a storm over it,” said Clara.

The child was clumsy certainly (although her legs were going to be good—you could already see that). But there was a lot of power under this clumsiness. Lucy complained that her little sisters united against her. It looked that way, Clara agreed. Patsy and Selma were graceful children, and they made Lucy seem burly, awkward before the awkward age. She would be awkward after it too, just as her mother had been, and eruptive, defiant and prickly. When Clara got through to her (the superlarge eyes of her slender face had to bear down on the kid till she opened up—“You can always talk to Mother about what goes on, what’s cooking inside”), then Lucy sobbed that all the girls in her class snubbed and made fun of her.

“Little bitches,” said Clara to Ms. Wong. “Amazing how early it all starts. Even Selma and Patsy, affectionate kids, are developing at Lucy’s expense. Her ‘grossness’—you know what a word ‘gross’ is with children—makes ladies of them. And the little sisters are far from dumb, but I believe Lucy is the one with the brains. There’s something major in Lucy. Gina Wegman agrees with me. Lucy acts like a small she-brute. It’s not just that Roman hairdo. She’s greedy and bears grudges. God, she does! That’s where Gina comes in, because Gina has so much class, and Gina likes her. As much as I can, with executive responsibilities and bearing the brunt of the household, I mother those girls. Also, I have sessions with the school psychologists—I was once married to one of those characters—and discussions with other mothers. Maybe putting them in the ‘best’ schools is a big mistake. The influence of the top stockbrokers and lawyers in town has to be overcome there. I’m saying it as I see it….”

What Clara couldn’t say, because Laura Wong’s upbringing was so different from her own (and it was her own that seemed the more alien), had to do with Matthew 16:18: “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”— it being love, against which no door can be closed. This was more of the primitive stuff that Clara had brought from the backcountry and was part of her confused inner life. Explaining it to her confidante would be more trouble than it was worth, if you considered that in the end Ms. Wong would still be in the dark—the second dark being darker than the first. Here Clara couldn’t say it as she saw it.

There’s a lot of woman in that child. A handsome, powerful woman. Gina Wegman intuits the same about her,” said Clara.

She was much drawn to Gina, only it wouldn’t be wise to make a younger mend of her; that would lie too close to adoption and perhaps cause rivalry with the children. You had to keep your distance—avoid intimacies, avoid confidences especially. Yet there was nothing wrong with an occasional treat, as long as the treat was educational. For instance, you asked the au pair girl to bring some papers to your office, and then you could show her around the suite, give her a nice tea. She let Gina attend a trade briefing on shoulder pads and hear arguments for this or that type of padding, the degree of the lift, the desirability of a straighter line in the hang of one’s clothes; the new trends in size in the designs of Armani, Christian Lacroix, Sonia Rykiel. She took the girl to a show of the latest spring fashions from Italy, where she heard lots of discussion about the desirability of over-the-knee boots, and of the layering of the skirts of Gianni Versace over puffy knickers. Agitprop spokesmen putting across short garments of puckered silk, or jackets of cunningly imitated ocelot, or simulated beaver capes—all this the ingenious work of millionaire artisans, billionaire designer commissars. Gina came suitably dressed, a pretty girl, very young. Clara couldn’t say how this fashion display impressed her. It was best, Clara thought, to underplay the whole show: the luxurious setting, the star cast of Italians, and the pomp of the experts—somewhat subdued by the presence of the impassive czarina.

“Well, what should I say about these things?” said Clara, again confiding to Laura Wong. “This glitter is our living, and nice women grow old and glum, cynical too, in all this glitz of fur, silk, leather, cosmetics, et cetera, of the glamour trades. Meanwhile my family responsibilities are what count. How to protect my children.”

“And you wanted to give your Gina a treat,” said Ms. Wong. “And I’m glad about the playfulness,” said Clara. “We have to have that. But the sums it costs! And who gets what! Besides, Laura, if it has to be slathered onto women… If a woman is beautiful and you add beautiful dress, that’s one thing: you’re adding beauty to beauty. But if the operation comes from the outside only, it has curious effects. And that’s the way it generally happens. Of course there will be barefaced schemers or people in despair looking glorious. But in most cases of decoration, the effect is hell. It’s a variation on that Auden line I love so much about ‘the will of the insane to suffer.’” When she had said this she looked blankly violent. She had gone further than she had intended, further than Ms. Wong was prepared to follow. Here Clara might well have added the words from Matthew 16.

Her Chinese American confidante was used to such sudden zooming. Clara was not being stagy when she expressed such ideas about clothing; she was brooding audibly, and very often she had Ithiel Regler in mind, the women he had gone off with, the women he had married. Among them were several “fancy women”—she meant that they were overdressed sexpots, gaudy and dizzy, “ground-dragging titzers,” on whom a man like Ithiel should never have squandered his substance. And he had been married three times and had two children. What a waste! Why should there have been seven marriages, five children! Even Mike Spontini, for all his powers and attractions, had been a waste—a Mediterranean, an Italian husband who came back to his wife when he saw fit, that is, when he was tired of business and of playing around. All the others had been dummy husbands, humanly unserious—you could get no real masculine resonance out of any of them.

What a pity! thought Laura Wong. Teddy Regler should have married Clara. Apply any measure—need, sympathy, feeling, you name it—and the two profiles (that was Laura’s way of putting it) were just about identical. And Ithiel was doing very badly now. Just after Gina became her au pair girl, Clara learned from the Wolfenstein woman, Teddy’s first wife, who had her scouts in Washington, that the third Mrs. Regler had hired a moving van and emptied the house one morning as soon as Teddy left for the office. Coming home in the evening, he found nothing but the bed they had shared the night before (stripped of bedding) and a few insignificant kitchen items. Francine, the third wife, had had no child to take care of. She had spent her days wandering around department